Dancer film review ★★★★★

Who is Sergei Polunin? Dancer documentary shows him to be more of an unhappy adolescent than fast-living playboy

1 CW reader is interested

Documentary 'Dancer', Sergei Polunin – Take Me to Church video

Dancer film review 3Dancer film review Teresa Guerreiro

The tone of Dancer, a
documentary about ballet star Sergei Polunin, is set in the first scene. Filmed backstage just before a performance, Polunin boasts that he sometimes takes so many stimulants that he can’t remember being
onstage. Then Black Sabbath’s Iron Man starts playing on the soundtrack, in
case the film-makers weren’t clear enough about their angle: Polunin is the rock
star of the dance world.

Superficially, this makes sense. The young Polunin has the
mix of exuberance and arrogance, campness and virility, that found its first
and most perfect expression in the 1960s' Mick Jagger. There are cheekbones, a wide
white smile and luscious curls; there are Daily Mail headlines, tattoos and
idolatrous fans. But Dancer constantly
feels like it’s trying to justify Polunin’s bad boy reputation rather than
looking beyond or behind it.

The story it actually tells is almost mournful, at odds with
the blazing rise, epic fall narrative it subscribes to. Polunin was born in
relatively humble circumstances in Ukraine, his talent clearing a path to
bigger things. The most mesmerising parts of Dancer
are the home videos of from his infancy: effortlessly shimmying himself up the
jamb of an open door, his prodigious strength and co-ordination makes the young
Polunin seem truly special, though as a picture-book superhero rather than a rock star.

Polunin wasn’t born with these powers, of course.
There were hundreds of classes, hours of rigorous training. Of his mother,
Polunin says: ‘I think she was angry with her parents for not having pushed her,
so she made sure she pushed me.’ This story is the same for millions of children with ambitious parents, and it’s an entirely unremarkable one. The
only thing that sets Polunin apart is the extent of his mother’s ambition, and
the astonishing, mindless, unforgiving talent that resulted from it.

Dancer charts Polunin’s
stint at the Royal Ballet (where he became its youngest ever principal), his
move to Russia (where he appeared on humiliatingly tacky TV shows), and his
redemptive collaboration with David LaChapelle on a dance choreographed to
Hozier’s Take Me to Church, the video
of which went viral.

Sergei Polunin in David LaChapelle's video for 'Take Me to Church'

Aside from the Take Me
to Church footage, there’s not much in Dancer
that demonstrates why Polunin is such an exciting dancer, and he’s not
exciting enough off-stage to interest otherwise. Dancer’s examples of his ‘hard living’ aren’t shocking; they’re
actually pretty endearing, especially the videos of Polunin and his adolescent contemporaries
mugging for a smartphone camera, flaunting the cigarettes they’re audaciously
smoking. Polunin’s consumptions and late bedtimes are only transgressive for
those who have to treat their bodies like thoroughbreds. The effect of vodka
shots on Polunin’s nervous system is predictable: he had a reputation for
falling asleep at parties after ten minutes.

Dancer is most intriguing in its examination of the psychological toll of excellence. The existential
trap of being drilled in a single discipline from toddlerhood is exacerbated by
the physical trap of being a professional dancer at the highest level. As a top-tier ballet dancer, you
are a ‘prisoner to your body’: your muscles seize up if you stop putting them
under the relentless pressure of performance, a series of extreme tests that preclude most
other activities due to the risk of injury. Polunin says that he always hoped
he’d get injured, which is a desperately sad thing to admit to.

But there’s an obvious compensation, made most apparent in
one of Dancer’s funnier moments: a
crowd of female ballet students, watching Polunin practise, all have the same awed,
hungry expression on their face. Mick Jagger might be jealous, especially these
days.